Hey gang! This is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques.This week I am going to show you how to create a seamlessly repeating tilepattern inside Photoshop.Now it could be anything.It could a texture.It could be a bump map, what have you.In my case, I am creating some custom gift wrap. So imagine this.You get a very tiny gift--that way you can print it out on your desktop printer, right?--and then wrap the gift in this paper, and you will save on bows!That's some thinking I am doing on your behalf here, and I am going to showyou how it works exactly inside this movie.

All right, so as I say this is our gift wrapping pattern right here, but tryingto wrap your brain around how to approach such a pattern is anything but obviousinside of Photoshop.So, I will be providing you with some tips and tricks as we work through the process.I will say upfront, however, that the most essential tool in our arsenal forevaluating the seams in a pattern is the Offset filter.One of the older and more obscure features inside the software,it's absolutely indispensable for our purposes right now.So I am going to switch over to this composition that I have assembled here.

And I should say upfront, just FYI, it measures 600 pixels X 600 pixels tall.So it's going to be a square pattern tile.Your pattern tiles can be rectangular.It's not a problem. Any size image is going to work for you, but you do have tomake sure that the left side of the pattern of the tile matches up with theright side, and the top matches up with the bottom.Well, things look pretty good.I have got this gold ribbon and then this red ribbon.I downloaded both of them from the Fotolia Stock Image library. And the redribbon in particular looks like it's going to match exactly.

It looks like it was designed to work inside of a pattern tile, and then a goldribbon looks like it present a little bit of work, because of the wonky angle ofthis ribbon over here on the right-hand side, but I should be able to workthrough things pretty easily. Well, let's see.You go up in order to judge how this image is going to fair, because as I say,it measures 600 pixels X 600 pixels tall. There is no more to it.The layer does not happen to be any larger than the canvas.So what you do is you go up to the Filter menu, you choose Other, and youchoose Offset. And by the way, the fact that the layer is exactly the same size of the image,that's very, very important for your purposes.

You do want to make sure that your images are cropped to fit inside the canvas.All right, anyway, I am going to choose the Offset command, and what it allows youto do is, for one thing, you are just moving pixels around, just as if you haddragged them to a different location--with one big exception.The undefined areas, rather than just revealing the checkerboard transparency inthe background, get filled with wrapped-around pixels.So Photoshop is essentially wrapping the image around itself.And as a result, we are seeing the seams.

There is the seam between the horizontal portions of the ribbon, and then thereis the seam between the vertical portions of the ribbon.So that's interesting. Apparently, this thing is not lining up worth beans.And by the way, notice I have changed the Horizontal value and Vertical values bothof them to 300 pixels, so half the size of the image.And you don't have to do that; any number of pixels works out just fine, but Ijust want you to understand what's going on there.So what I decided was that gosh, the gold ribbon is in worse shape than I thought it was.The red ribbon looks like it's going to be, as I say, it's going to be great.

So, why don't we just go ahead and cover up these seams? As opposed to trying to fix them,let's just cover them up with the red ribbon.So I am going to cancel out of here for a moment, cancel out of the OffsetFilter, and I am going to turn on the red ribbon layer, and I am going to goahead and set it to the Multiply Blend mode, so that I can see through it to theunderlying gold layer there.And then I will go ahead and click on gold once again, go back to Offset bychoosing Other and Offset, and the reason I am doing this is I now want to goahead and line up the gold ribbon with the red ribbon. And the values that Ifigured out would work are -250 for horizontal and then for verticalpositive 210. And notice what that does is it puts the scene from the goldribbon right behind the red ribbon.

Now, don't worry about the fact that the gold ribbon is getting cut off all over the place.It's seamlessly repeating.We know that part seamlessly repeats because it fit together in the first place,so that's not going to be any problem whatsoever. Anyway, we are justworried about this area.So I will click OK, and now what I have got to do is drop out the whites in thered ribbon layer and leave the red portions of the ribbon absolutely opaque.So what I need to do is change the blend mode back to Normal here.And I am going to go ahead and double- click on the empty portion on this redribbon layer and then I will go down here to this layer slider, and I will dropout the whites by dragging this guy down to 140--is what I figured out worked.

So anything with the luminous level on this layer of 140 or brighter is goingto turn transparent.And we are going to see through the gold ribbon blow.Problem is, we have got some real choppy edges where the red ribbon is concerned.Now normally, you would try to Alt+Drag that white slider triangle in halfso that you would get some better transitions, but that's not going to help us in this case.So what I am going to do is I am going to duplicate that red ribbon layer, and Iam going to duplicate it by Alt+Dragging or Option+Dragging it.Notice if you Alt+Drag or Option+Drag a layer inside the Layers panel to a differentlocation, you will copy it, as indicated by that little copy cursor there.

So I went ahead and created a copy below gold ribbon. Now what I need to do is reset it.I will go ahead and double click on it, and drag this white slider triangleback up to 255, so the entire layer is absolutely opaque. And that hasn't done us any good.That's because we can't see through the gold ribbon.All right, let me back out here for a moment, and I will go ahead and turnoff the top red ribbon,go ahead and select gold ribbon, and I am going to change its blend mode to Multiply,so that we can see that red ribbon in the background. The only portions that aregetting messed up are the portions that are going to get covered in just amoment when I turn red ribbon back on. See that?So now we are absolutely covering those seams in the gold ribbon. Awesome!All right, but here is the big problem.

I think the red ribbon is going to repeat seamlessly. I don't know it for a factuntil I check it out with the Offset filter.Well, now we have three layers that we need to offset together that we haveto contend with here.So, click on one, Shift+Click on the other, and of course we have only done this amillion times in this technique so far.What we are going to do is go to the Layers Panel menu, and we are going toconvert this guy into a Smart Object.That way we can filter all three layers at the same time.So go ahead and choose Convert to Smart Object and then go up to the Filter menu,choose Other, and choose Offset.

And I have to say, one of the brilliant things about Smart Objects inside aPhotoshop is that they take these version 1.0 filters and make themnon-destructive, which is totally awesome.Anyway, I will choose Offset, and I am going to go ahead and enter 300 and 300,just half the dimensions of this image. And I can see right away that I wastotally wrong about this red ribbon.It doesn't repeat worth beans. So, interesting, in a bad way. Anyway, click OK inorder to accept that modification.So now it dawns on me, well in that case, I might as well, if I have got to fixthese darn ribbons anyway,I might as well make the gold ribbon go in front over here on the left-handside, and the red ribbon be in front down here at the bottom, so that they are interlaced.

And I went ahead and set these layers up in advance.I am going to tell you how I created these layers, how I actually fixed theseams, in a separate video that's available to members of the lynda.comOnline Training Library.So those of you who are members, check out the next video in this series andyou will see how I put these layers together, but for now I am just going toturn them on for you here.There is the red ribbon layer, which is a bit of red ribbon that I found in theoriginal image. And then I masked it.And I am going to Shift+Click on this layer mask to turn it on, so that you willsee that I masked this layer.

And we get this nice sort of seamless ribbon action going on except for rightthere, this little single pixel of anti-aliasingthat was not accounted for.So I created this layer of white.It's just a cover-up layer, and so as soon as I turned on, you can see thatlittle edge goes away.All right, and then let's go check this guy out.I created this gold layer right there, so it's a piece of the gold ribbon that Iactually skewed at a different angle and it looks terrible. And I also, by theway, I went ahead and scaled it a little bit, too.

So I upsampled it, so it's got all of these wretched edges going on.Well, then I turned around and created a layer mask.It's a hack layer mask, but it works. And then I decided, you know what, theseribbons should be casting shadows on to each other, so I created this gradslayer right there. I will go ahead and zoom out so that we can see it in both the locations.And I will turn on the grads layer and you can see that there are just thesetiny little gradients that are casting shadows.As I say, if you want to see how I actually made this work, what commands I usedand so forth, then check out the next video where I discuss how to fix scenesin a repeating tile pattern in the lynda.com Online Training Library.

But anyway, now I want to make this into a pattern.So what you do is you go up to the Edit menu and you choose Define pattern.You don't have to select anything.It will work from the composite image.Just choose Define pattern, and it's grabbing the name from the name of the image.I am just going to change it to two ribbons. Click OK and that's it.Now, I am going to create this big, huge image, so just press Ctrl+N, Command+Non the Mac to create a new image.It matches 3600 pixels wide by 3600 pixels tall--in other words six times the width, six times the height--so we will be able tofit in a total of six times six, so 36 different pattern tiles.

Click OK in order to create this new image, and then we are way too farzoomed out at this point. But that's okay.Drop down here to the black white icon at the bottom of the Layers panel.Choose the Pattern command, and it should automatically go ahead and grab thelast pattern you created.If you want to drag a pattern around, you can, like so. But otherwise, justclick OK and you will see that it repeats brilliantly and seamlessly and soforth. And if that's not big enough, because 3600 pixels by 3600 pixels at 300pixels per inch is only a foot, and you are not going to be able to wrapanything with that--unless it's a very small box--but if you want it to bebigger, why then you could just go up to the Image menu, choose the Canvas Sizecommand, and dial in anything you want.

I will switch to Inches and I will say, you know what,I want this to be 36 inches wide--that's three feet, of course--by 24 inches tall. That's two feet.Click OK and look at that. Photoshop automatically fills in the differencewith more pattern tiles.So there you have it.That's how you create a seamlessly repeating pattern tile for gift wrap or anyother purpose here inside Photoshop.

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Author

Updated

3/6/2018

Released

1/13/2011

This course is a collection of short Photoshop and Illustrator projects and creative effects that can be completed in ten minutes or less. The series is taught by computer graphics guru Deke McClelland, and presented in his signature step-by-step style. The intent is to reveal how various Photoshop and Illustrator features can be combined and leveraged in real-world examples so that they can be applied to creative projects right away.

Skill Level Intermediate

118h 18m

Duration

2,379,813

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Q: Why can't I earn a Certificate of Completion for this course?

A: We publish a new tutorial or tutorials for this course on a regular basis. We are unable to offer a Certificate of Completion because it is an ever-evolving course that is not designed to be completed. Check back often for new movies.